


Capricious

by pyrchance



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Blonde!Frank, Current era, F/M, Fluff, Quarantine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:47:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27873278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrchance/pseuds/pyrchance
Summary: Jamia cackles as he comes out of the bathroom. She doesn’t even try to hide it.“Oh babe, your poor hair.”
Relationships: Frank Iero/Jamia Nestor
Comments: 10
Kudos: 39





	Capricious

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt was capricious – adj. changes unexpectedly based on impulse or chance rather than necessity.

Look, Frank knows why he did it.

It’s not like he hasn’t done it before. He’s lived his whole life with an itch under his skin that countless needles have never managed to scratch. Sometimes he just needs to take his body and turn it inside out. To brand it something new so he can recognize it by the sign posts. Granted, the last time Frank had decided to fuck with his hair this suddenly it had been shaving it near to the bone, not dipping his hand back into the dye box.

Jamia cackles as he comes out of the bathroom. She doesn’t even try to hide it.

“Oh babe, your poor hair.”

“It was your daughter’s idea,” Frank mutters, because he’s not above blaming a ten-year-old for his mistakes. “You’re the one that gave her the big puppy eyes.”

“Please tell me I don’t have discolored children running around.”

“Just half-blue ones,” Frank returns. “Apparently, they were just fine using the temporary stuff after they saw what happened with the bleach.”

His wife is still shaking with laughter as she comes up and fixes the towel around his neck. Her nails scrape against his neck, passing through a few drops of water still dripping from his hair. She tugs at some strands at the base his skull.“You didn’t have to, you know. You could have told them no.”

Frank shoots her a scathing look. They have both been subjected to their kids’ begging for days. Neither of them is that strong. Jamia snorts. “Okay. I admit, we might have taken out the old albums a few days ago. The girls had a school project. They might have been inspired.”

Frank is usually a pretty unabashed person, but even he feels a scrawl of heat up his neck. “Which albums?”

Jamia just grins at him and flicks the end of his towel. “Don’t worry. The ones in the basement are still all yours.”

His wife’s offhand comment sends brain worms digging into Frank’s head. He tugs a beanie on after the kids have gone to bed, claiming to be cold which isn’t exactly untrue. Jamia watches him from her side of the sofa but doesn’t say a word as he gently moves her feet from his lap and casually strolls towards the basement.

“I’ve got this melody thing,” he says waving a hand near his head.

Her eyebrows are two sharp, pointed things, even as she never looks away from _Wheel of Fortune_. “Sure, hun.”

Frank has never met a more wicked woman. He both loves and fears her far too much. He flees.

The basement steps creak as he comes down them. Frank tries really, really hard not to let the basement be his favorite room in the house. He hangs pictures of Sweet Pea upstairs. He takes on breakfast duty in an attempt to learn how kitchens work after more than a decade without one. He lets Jamia put as many pillows on the bed as will fit and pretends she’s the one who picked out the million-count sheets. The point is, he tries. It’s just that all these tactics do not always work.

It smells like wood and cotton when he comes down the steps. He runs his hands over the shelves of guitars as he goes like he usually does, still not entirely sure how all of them came to be his even after all these years.

Beyond his collection and his mini studio is the garage proper where things like their holiday decorations and the kids’ bikes are stored. It also contains the boxes and boxes of old band stuff he wouldn’t dare get rid of but doesn’t actually look at too often. He knows he’s not the only one guilty of being a pack rat. He’s seen Way’s basement long before they got anywhere near big. Frank is in no way the biggest hoarder of the band.

But he is, maybe, just a little bit, by a smidge, the most sentimental.

It was Jamia’s idea to make the scrapbooks. She’d done one once, back when they were really early in their dating and going on tour across three states had seemed huge. She’d collected all of the ticket stubs and crummy Polaroids he’d brought home and pressed them neatly into a book that she’d presented to him a few weeks after he’d returned. Just like that, bridging the road to their home in a way that let them both look back an experience it together.

If Frank had any doubts about marrying her, they’d died then. Oh, there have been other difficulties, other hurdles and missteps, fights and broken hearts, but Frank had known right from then that she was his girl.

It’d become something of a tradition once he’d started touring properly. He would squirrel away all the little trinkets and mementos in his bunk on the road and Jamia would help him unpack and share them and put them tidily away until the next time. More concrete than phone calls and letters, Jamia once said the scrapbooks were like Frank’s way of saying, “And I thought of you here and here and here.”

Frank opens up one of the first books, wincing at the sight of his old dreads like he can still feel their itch. Yeah, he’s definitely not a stranger to hair mistakes.

He likes that hair can tell the story of an era though. He settles on the floor ignoring his old man back and pulls them out one by one. The mohawk seems just as ridiculous in hindsight as it had at the time. He still loves it far too much. He watches as his hair runs from short to long to short again. He tries to keep his eyes on his own hair journey, even if it isn’t the real story. But eventually his eyes are drawn to that shock of red and sickly white and long, stringing black. He can’t be blame for it. Gerard always was effective at giving a message.

Frank’s own story is buried in his skin more than his hair. He likes things permanent. Lasting. That’s how he know to make a statement.

He thinks about hair and the temporary nature of hair dye and tries not to let the brain worms dig too deep.

“I could dye it,” Frank says scrolling through his twitter mentions with only a slightly pursed mouth. Frank can’t get mad at them. Not really. He’s the one doing the dirty work of poking around.

“You did just dye it,” Jamia responds, her neck half craned around to watch their son by the pool. It’s far too cold in Jersey to be swimming, but his kids are little hellions. He and Jamia wear fuzzy hats and sweaters and pull their pool chairs far back from the water to supervise.

“Maybe blue,” adds Frank, not really listening. “There wasn’t enough left in the bottle after the girls, but I could order more. I should have checked we had enough before I put the bleach in.”

“Put your phone down, Frank.”

“It’s fine. I’m barely looking.”

“Barely looking is still looking. You’ll give yourself another headache if you keep up that face.”

“What face?”

“The face that is going to give you all those old man wrinkles. Not the happy kind either. You don’t want to wear that frown forever.”

Frank grumbles but closes the app, palming his cell and passing it back and forth restlessly. This is why he avoids going for the hair. The hit never lasts.

“You need to get outside,” Jamia says, poking him with her foot. Her feet are gray from the cement. He makes a face that she laughs at. “Babe.”

“At least dip them in the pool first. They’re all dirty.”

“It’s just dust. My toes aren’t covid positive. I don’t have the plague.”

“You know,” says Frank sniffing delicately as she wiggles her toes at him, “you shouldn’t joke about that.”

But he gets up and walks around the pool because Jamia is smarter than him and he knows it. He gets splashed by all three of his children has he goes, and maybe has to grab the garden hose to retaliate, but it’s worth it. Even soaked and freezing he does feel better.

At least until the time he takes him to dry off and pick back up his phone.

“I think you need to get _outside_ outside,” Jamia says to him when they’re lying in bed that night. Frank’s jittering leg is shaking the whole mattress, something he doesn’t notice until she touches his thigh.

“Like a hike?” Frank asks. They’ve been going on hikes. A lot actually. A bit too much for Frank’s city born tastes honestly.

“Like some place you won’t feel compelled to take thirty selfies everyday and delete each one. You can turn that thing off, by the way. Or just dye your hair it back if you hate it so much.”

She looks down at his phone laying on his stomach. He’d just been scrolling through the sports pages, thinking of texting Mikey, thinking of hair dye. He glances slyly at his wife, wondering how quickly she’d call him on it if he dyed his hair Bayern red.

“I thought the whole point of this quarantine bullshit was to stay indoors,” Frank grumbles, thumbing the off button and putting his phone to the side.

“Maybe,” Jamia admits, shoulders dropping once his phone is away, “but you’re terrible at this. I know you’re bored out of your skull.”

Frank looks up at the subtle tremor in her voice that undercuts the casual way she waves her hands. He curls over and takes his wife’s fingers, waiting until she turns her head back to him. He says, “You know I love being home with you and kids. I’m happy to be here. It’s been really fucking rad having this much time with the kids.”

Jamia runs so cool her tells when she’s frustrated are obvious. In this case, it’s the small tension in his jaw as she shakes her head. “You’ve always been a good dad. I’m not calling that into question. You are. This isn’t fishing or— or you know, trying to ambush you.”

“It sort of feels like an ambush,” Frank admits and Jamia shakes his head again.

“I just know you, Frankie.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“This isn’t how we work.” She raises a hand, motioning between them. Her expression is open, but conflicted. “I thought it would feel really good having you home all the time but this much just feels greedy.”

His attention is fully commanded. Frank sits up. He tugs on her hand until she looks back at him. “You’re my wife. The kids are my kids. There’s nothing more important to me than you guys.”

“I know that,” she says, squeezing back in his grip. “We’re solid, babe. We’ve always been solid.” She sighs though, and the relief Frank feels upon hearing those words doesn’t last as she takes another breath. “It’s just. I feel guilty knowing you’re missing the other half of your life. I know you hide it well but you’ve been miserable for months. We both know what this year was supposed to be for you, Frankie.”

There they are, the words they’ve been dancing around and making light of since the first signs of the lockdown began.

Frank swallows. “There’s always next year,” he says, trying for levity. Jamia’s too tough for it.

“It just feels like you’re all wound up with nowhere to go. I know what you look like when you’re happy, Frank. Really really happy. You’re not that right now. You’re half-way content maybe, and well loved, but that’s not the same thing.”

“You guys make me happy.”

“It’s a different kind of happiness,” she amends, still squeezing his hand. “It’s just a matter of balance. We’re tipped too far to one side. I know you miss it.”

Jamia has always been better about seeing the big picture than him. Frank is a details person. A go-with-his-gut person. The type of person who lets things consume him and eat him up or digs in deep without letting go or thinking once of future consequences.

“So, a trip then,” Frank eventually says. “You think I should go away.”

Jamia blinks back at him, something grateful in her eyes. They’ve always been able to understand each other. To talk. It’s how they’ve last all these years.

That and this, Jamia’s easy wisdom, her huge dark eyes gentle with him in the dark: “I think you should go get balanced, Frankie. You tell me what that means.”

Frank lifts his wife’s hands and kisses her knuckles. The smartest, most terrifying, loving woman he’s ever met, that’s her.

When he finally takes the picture, it’s almost a week later, exactly how long it took to get his results back. He only lets himself delete two before throwing it online. He closes down his phone before he can count all the little numbers ticking up.

Frank doesn’t want to know. He seriously does not.

Jamia says, “You can’t leave your phone here. What if you break down in the middle of the highway, genius?” and also, “I bought you a funnel for your pee bottles. Remember this the next time you wonder how much I love you.”

So Frank packs his cell phone and his empty bottles and his cooler full of sandwiches and snacks and gets them all arranged his car next to the sleeping bag and guitar all laid out in the back. At minimum it’s a three day drive to get across the country and Frank has promised his wife, his kids, and God to stop for gas and nothing else.

Does it feel a bit like cheating, stuffing up his car in the middle of a pandemic? Yes. It really, really does. Frank isn’t proud of it. He’s not going to advertise it. He’s more than a little guilty, even if he’s taken all the precautions.

But more than guilt what he knows best is that his skin stopped itching the second he ended his first call to his band, letting them know he’s coming. It felt remarkably like going home the same moment he packed up his bags.

He hugs his kids and his wife and his dog goodbye. He climbs into his car with a hulking thermos of coffee, a playlist loaded up, and babywipes in the glove box. Never forget the babywipes.

He rolls his window down as Jamia comes up to kiss him goodbye. A sudden flash as they are breaking apart has Frank blinking back spots.

Jamia grins as she lowers the camera. It’s baby pink and boxy and it chugs as it spits out a tiny Polaroid picture from the top.

“They still make those things?” Frank asks, bewildered.

“I was going to surprise the girls,” Jamia says, winking at him. “Don’t tell them daddy stole their new toy if you want to live.”

She plucks the photo from the camera and passes it over, along with a collection of little film boxes. She’s still shaking it out when Frank finishes setting the unexpected addition into his passenger seat.

“I have a phone,” Frank reminds her.

“I don’t want your instagram memories, Frank Iero. I want the real stuff.” Her eyes dance as she glances down at the picture in her hands, before quickly tucking it away. He knows that smirk on her face. “Besides, you need something else to collect if there aren’t going to be passes and ticket stubs.”

His wife, ladies and gentleman. Can you believe it? Frank already knows whatever his face must be doing is downright embarrassing.

“You’re not going to let me see it?” he asks.

She jerks her head in the direction behind them. Frank turns in his seat and finds his three kids have already forgotten their father idling in the driveway as they fight over something plastic, pink, and square.

“I figure we can have our own little party while you’re gone,” Jamia says, leaning in one more time to kiss him. It’s _almost_ enough to make Frank bail on the whole trip. Her hand pushes him back against his seat. “When you get back,” she says and her eyes are bright and wicked. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

Frank’s skin tingles with an entirely different set of problems. “You promise?”

Jamia rakes her hand through his hair and tugs, before stepping back.

“Get out of here, Iero. Don’t you know we can only stand your face for so long?”

“Love you,” he calls, finally turning the key.

“Don’t spill the pee bottles.”

His giggles drown at the engine. He hits the breaks at the end of the driveway, twisting around in his seat and angling the camera out through his back window, to the people and place that he loves.

He tucks the picture into his visor—his first little treasure—and slams on his playlist.

He can’t wait to collect some more.


End file.
